How The GOP Captured The South

In her latest Political Points commentary, CBS News Senior Political Editor Dotty Lynch looks at a new book that analyzes how the Republican Party seized control of the South from the Democrats.

The retirements of Phil Gramm in Texas, Jesse Helms in North Carolina and Strom Thurmond in South Carolina have produced strong candidates in both parties. The Republican contenders are by and large more moderate than the retiring incumbents and the Democrats running against them are all claiming the centrist label.

These campaign strategies could have come out of the playbook of two leading Southern political scientist brothers, Earl and Merle Black. In the tradition of the great American political scientist, V.O. Key, the brothers Black (Earl from Houston's Rice University and Merle from Atlanta's Emory) have meticulously analyzed reams of voting data, exit polls and public opinion surveys to examine political trends in the Deep and Peripheral South.

"The Rise of Southern Republicans" follows their earlier book, "The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected," and chronicles the last 50 years of presidential and congressional elections in the South. While eminently readable, this is a book chuck full of data, not anecdotes. However, the seismic political changes in the region since 1950 provide more than enough drama to compensate for the heavy reliance on statistics, charts and newspaper articles.

They begin by recalling that in 1950 there were no GOP senators from the South and only two of the 105 House members from the South were Republicans. Today, 13 of the 22 U.S. senators and 71 of the 125 House members from the South are from the GOP.

The first Republican elected to the Senate from the South was Texas' John Tower in 1961. For a hundred years following the Civil War (a.k.a. the War between the States), Southerners loathed the Republican Party, symbolized first by Abraham Lincoln and then by Herbert Hoover.

Prior to 1960, the national Democratic Party made an implicit pact with Southerners that they wouldn't tamper with segregation if southerners supported key economic legislation. But, by the '60s, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson could no longer turn a blind eye to Southern racism and the Democratic domination of the South began to crumble.

One of the great quotes in the book comes from LBJ, a protégé of Georgia Democratic Sen. Richard Russell, who went along with segregationist policies in the early part of his career. But by 1964, Johnson concluded that it was time to pass a civil rights bill. "Dick, I love you. But I'm going to run over you if you challenge me or get in my way. I am going to pass the civil rights bill, only this time, Dick, there will be no compromise, no falling back. This bill is going to pass." And after a three-month filibuster and with the vote of only one Southern Democrat (liberal Texan Ralph Yarborough), it did. By 1982 the change in the Southern Democratic senatorial delegation was so huge that all11 members – including old timers, Russell Long of Louisiana and John Stennis of Mississippi – voted for the extension of the Voting Rights Act.

According to the Blacks, the first shift by Southerners from hating the party of Lincoln and Hoover to loving the party of Goldwater started in the '60s. In 1968 and 1972 Richard Nixon and his team had a finely crafted Southern strategy, but Watergate thwarted the spread of the movement.

"The Great White Switch" didn't happen until the presidency of Ronald Reagan when massive numbers of white Southerners felt comfortable calling themselves Republicans "His optimistic conservatism and successful performance in office made the Republican Party respectable and useful for millions of Southern whites." A combination of positions on civil rights and demographic changes that brought a number of anti-government, anti-tax suburban voters into the South formed the basis of Republican Party's appeal.

The second half of the book focuses on the next big surge for Republicans, which came in the 1990s when they were able to move from presidential success to significant congressional wins. While Reagan had both realigned Southern conservatives and de-aligned Southern moderates, it was Newt Gingrich who moved the congressional numbers. In 1992 he and Dick Armey set in motion a plan to take over the House; and in 1994, they seized on the initial failures of the Clinton administration, targeted those landslide Republican presidential districts and seriously funded strong Republican candidates. "For the first time in 12 decades the Republican Party emerged with a net advantage in the Southern delegation."

However, the Blacks believe that Gingrich overreached and lost the big battle for the mainstream of America by shutting down the government in 1995, tried to govern too ideologically and exhibited an "immature leadership style."

Despite the Republican gains, the GOP has not been able to completely dominate the South. This is mainly because younger Democrats have figured out ways to put together strong biracial coalitions forcing Republicans to get huge majorities of white voters in order to win. While the Republican claim on conservative white Southerners is total, the white moderates are still up for grabs. The strongly conservative positions that endear Republicans to their base alienate the moderates. Southern Democrats who align too closely with the liberal positions of the national party risk the same fate with those key swing voters.

One wishes that the Blacks did a little more with the 2000 election where two candidates from the Peripheral South were locked in a 50-50 election, and that they concentrated a bit more on the waning of the religious right and the impact of the growing Hispanic populations in Florida and Texas. But there is so much here about the massive changes between 1950 and 2000, that this is a tiny quibble. And one suspects that a paperback edition or another book by the Blacks will pick up where this one leaves off. At least, let's hope so.